Improved description of the structural and optoelectronic properties of DNA/RNA nucleobase anhydrous crystals: Experiment and dispersion-corrected density functional theory calculations

Abstract

The development of low cost and environmentally friendly organic electronic/optoelectronic devices has attracted a lot of interest. The integration of DNA and RNA nucleobases to improve the performance of organic light-emitting diodes has been proposed recently [Gomez et al., Sci. Rep. 4, 7105 (2014)], notwithstanding limited experimental and theoretical information on the optoelectronic properties of DNA/RNA thin films. As a contribution to an improved understanding of DNA/RNA-based devices in the solid state, we have performed in this paper dispersion corrected density functional theory (DFT) and time-dependent DFT (TDDFT) calculations to obtain the optimized geometries, Kohn-Sham band structures and orbitals, charge distribution, optical absorption, Frenkel exciton binding energies, and complex dielectric functions of the five DNA/RNA nucleobase anhydrous crystals, namely cytosine, guanine, adenine, thymine, and uracil. Optical absorption measurements on DNA/RNA nucleobase powders were also performed for comparison with the simulations. An improvement on the local density approximation (LDA) description of the lattice parameter estimates was achieved considering the generalized gradient approach (GGA) with a semiempirical dispersion correction scheme in comparison with structural x-ray data found in the literature. Energy gap correction using the \ensuremath{\Delta}-sol methodology provided a good agreement between theory and experimental estimates from our optical absorption data, greatly surpassing the quality of previous simulations. Effective masses for the carriers were also found, indicating that the guanine crystal as well as the cytosine one (although with some drawbacks) has potential applications in optoelectronics as a direct gap semiconductor, with the other nucleobases presenting either a semiconductor or an insulator character depending on the carrier type. The complex dielectric function exhibits a high degree of anisotropy for different states of light polarization relative to the molecular stacking planes, while the Frenkel exciton binding energy estimation for the adenine crystal is very close to the optical absorption experimental data.